Projects that started this summer & dealing with the winter..

Well here we are, literally 6 months after we started and the final logo was decided on today. After many, many numerous revisions, meetings and decision making, the mayor and the Kukes Regional Council decided on a logo for the municipality of Bajram Curri.

I learned many lessons during this project. I've worked with picky clients before with my design work, ones that think they know what they want but really don't or have a vision and want exactly that even a trained design eye thinks differently. This was definitely one of those times where I had to swallow my personal preferences and opinons and give them what they wanted and envisioned. I realized that while my time is short lived here, this logo will represent this municipality and town for years and years to come and I should give them exactly what they want, even if it goes against what I think looks the best.

I've only been living here a short 8 months and who am I to say what would represent them the best. I also learned how it feels to not be involved in the design decisions but just be given orders after the decisions have already been made with no input. I believe that this would happen in bigger design and marketing firms and I think is a good learning experience because it's not always an easy thing to do, especially since I put so much time into the design work I do. That's not an experience I have had yet, outside of school, because all of the design work I've done I was either the sole designer, begging for any kind of constructive feedback, or a freelance designer, only taking direction from the client.

So now that the logo has been decided on, it will be in the letter head of all of the documents that the Bashkia circulates out, locally, nationally and internationally. My new project is designing a flag for the logo that will represent the city as a whole. It's really great to be doing work here that actually relates to what I studied in school and I think after doing this logo and the tourism website my opportunities will open up to more projects. I had the mayor of Bujan, a small village outside of Bajram Curri, approach me at a Cafe last week wanting me to design a logo for the village of Bujan.

It's hard getting back into the swing of things after being gone for IST and the GAD conference for over a week, probably because it's about ten degrees colder up here than it was in Plepa. Nothing like getting up in the morning and the buckets of water you use to flush your toilet with are frozen over.

Also, nothing like the fire going out in the middle of the night and waking up and being able to see your breath in your living room that now serves as a bedroom.. that'll really make you want to get up in the morning let me tell you what. I've officially started buying items that should be refrigerated and putting them outside on my porch, it's really effective. Doing dishes kinda sucks because I can't feel my hands when I'm done and I'm at about 1 shower a week. But overall, it's not that bad.. I mean it could be worse.